Bengaluru
is India’s city of the twenty-first century. India’s
Silicon Valley, it’s often called, drawing upon our penchant for
American parallels.
Well, here’s another American parallel: racism. On Sunday, a mob
assaulted,
stripped and paraded a 21-year-old Tanzanian student, later on
setting fire to her car as well. Her only fault was that she was passing
through the same neighbourhood where, an hour before, a Sudanese student
had run over and killed a resident. The enraged mob simply picked on
the Tanzanian woman because she was
of the same race as the Sudanese driver.
How did the police react? The Deccan Chroniclereported
that when the woman approached the police station to register a
complaint, she was
turned away. Come back when you have the name of the driver, she was
told. Later on, a local politician, BS Shankar, even went so far as to
justify the violence.
Bosco Kaweesi, Legal Adviser to the All African Students
Union in Bengaluru said, in exasperation, “She’s Tanzanian, the man who caused
the accident comes from Sudan, they didn’t even know each other." Pervasive feature
Collective mob
justice is a pervasive feature of
Indian society. Usually it’s based on religion or caste but, in this
case, the identity picked up was race, a feature getting increasingly
common as significant
numbers of Africans move to India for work or education.
In 2013, Nigerians suffered racist attacks across Goa, even
as state Minister Dayanand Mandrekar called
them a cancer. So severe was that episode that Nigerian diplomats warned of a
backlash back in Nigeria against Indians working there. In 2014, a mob assaulted
two Africans at a Metro station in Delhi. The incident, captured on
camera,
depicted a frightening picture of racism, as the mob tried to get at the
two men cowering, ironically, inside a police booth. Earlier in Delhi, a
state minister
himself led
vigilante justice against the city’s African residents.
Bigotry based on skin colour has a chequered
past in India. At one level, Indians are obviously racist given how much value
we attach to light skin, even propping up a huge cosmetics industry to make
Indians fairer – an entire nation of Micheal Jacksons. Language and pop culture reflect that
as well. One of Bollywood’s evergreen songs tells of how even a “dark-skinned man” can be a good person. Languages like Hindi and Punjabi have their own N-word: habshi. India’s African elite
Of
course, India also does not have the debilitating legacy
of western slavery based on race (it was based on caste instead). Black
Africans have been a part of India’s elite in centuries past. In the
medieval Deccan,
for example, people of African-origin were highly-prized as ace sailors
and
mounted warriors. In the 17th century, the Abyssinian Malik Ambar rose
to become
the regent of the Ahmadnagar Sulatanate. His army consisted of Marathas,
including
Maloji, grandfather of Shivaji, and Ambar’s methods of guerrilla warfare
came to dominate the Deccan. In 1672, as the Aurangzeb ordered a naval
siege on
British Bombay, the Mughal fleet was commandeered by a man of
African-origin.
Descendants of those Africans who came to India, now make up
the Siddi community, also derogatorily called Habshis. After their heyday
in medieval India, they now face discrimination for being dark-skinned.
People who have tried to bring attention
to India’s frightening culture of majoritarian intolerance over the past year have been shouted
down, vilified and mocked. But pushing problems under the carpet usually makes
things worse. India has multiple faultlines of bigotry already. To add race to
that is an alarming prospect.
